The Dallas-Fort Worth region is one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic in the nation. From February 2018 to February 2019, North Texas added over 100,000 new jobs, more than any other metro area in the country except New York. The unemployment rate in North Texas is 3.6 percent, significantly below the 4.1 percent national average.

But this growth presents challenges. Land-use regulations in some established cities have pushed most of this growth out to the fringes of North Texas, in places like central and northern Collin and Denton counties, creating a serious transportation challenge. According to the consultancy INRIX, the average Dallas driver lost 76 hours every year to traffic congestion in 2018. And suburbs are developing in a way that leaves most people no choice but to drive everywhere — largely the result of regulations that require massive parking lots in every new development, making driving artificially cheap and walking unpleasant.

The result? North Texas workers are taking longer to travel to work, even as they travel shorter distances. From 2009 to 2017, the average distance that local workers commuted during rush hour fell by a mile, even as the average time they spent increased by three minutes. The frontier of new development in the metro area, in towns like Frisco and McKinney, is already well out of commuting distance for downtown Dallas, guaranteeing that a large amount of economic growth will be in suburban areas instead.

These trends are worrying for the future of North Texas economic mobility. They could prove especially bad for working- and middle-class families priced out of suburban areas. In Collin County, the median house price has increased by two-thirds in just eight years, from $195,000 in February 2011 to $325,000 in February 2019, according to the Texas A&M Real Estate Center. The median price in Denton County has increased almost as much, from $185,000 to $302,000.

Even more stark is the disappearance of homes affordable for families on working-class incomes. In 2011, 51 percent of the houses sold in Collin County, and 57 percent in Denton County, cost less than $200,000. By 2018, those numbers were down to 5 and 7 percent, respectively. One reason for this? Very few areas allow new apartments.

In Plano, for example, the zoning code allows multifamily development on only 6.1 percent of its land area. Plano is actually generous by the standards of other suburbs. Garland devotes only 4.4 percent of its land area to multifamily housing; Frisco, 1.7 percent; in Flower Mound, a mere 0.3 percent. As housing economists everywhere recognize, restricting the supply of new housing makes it more expensive for everyone.

To ensure that North Texas suburban residents can still afford to live close to work on a working-class salary, they should start by encouraging more construction of apartments. One obvious place to look? DART stations. Much of the land around the expensive and underused light-rail system is wasted on low-value uses such as distribution centers and auto repair shops.

Redeveloping a small fraction of that land with apartments could create tens of thousands of homes with easy commutes into central Dallas via DART. Private bus companies might even find it plausible to set up express routes between these new apartment clusters and suburban job centers, similar to tech companies' shuttles in the Bay Area, thus further alleviating demand on the freeway network.

Housing prices will never moderate, though, unless suburban municipalities take a fresh look at their public policies. Zoning codes typically prohibit residential development in industrial and commercial zones, for example. Parking minimums, furthermore, require businesses to provide parking lots that can be several times larger than the stores they serve, as well as large amounts of parking — often two spaces per dwelling unit — in residential zones. The amount of land on which any residential development denser than single-family is prohibited, moreover, is almost certainly excessive.

As Dallas suburbs become proper cities, they need to reconsider these policies to avoid becoming victims of their own success.